“Sakaki... am I really free from him?” Natsuki, catching up to him, asked as if she still couldn’t believe it.
“Looks like it, assuming he keeps his promise. You think he will?”
“I think he will.”
“I see,” Yuichi said. “Sounds pretty good to me, then.”
“But I also don’t know what he’ll do about the parts he didn’t promise,” she added.
“Well, that’s true. Something else could still happen, but we’ll deal with that when we come to it.”
“Yes... but thank you for really coming to save me.”
Yuichi blushed a little at her unusually honest reaction.
“Yuichi...” The woman he was carrying spoke up weakly. She seemed to have awakened.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Actually, you probably shouldn’t talk right now. Your chest was badly hurt.”
“I’m okay, this is n...” she trailed off in a cough, spattering blood onto Yuichi’s shoulders. “I’m sorry, Yuichi. I’ll die soon, okay?”
“Hey! It’s okay! Don’t die over that!” he shouted.
“Right. If you don’t mind, then I won’t mind.” Her voice was remarkably clear for someone with a crushed lung, and she also seemed remarkably cheerful.
“Well, I mean, I do mind a little, but it’s okay...” Yuichi said. “Now, Takeuchi. What’s your connection to this person? Though I think I can figure it out...”
They seemed to be fellow serial killers, but he was hesitant to say that out loud.
“Aki Takizawa,” Natsuki said. “A former serial killer. She’s a type of recruitable monster, and since you converted her, she saved me.”
“Right,” he said. “I didn’t quite understand all of that, but if you saved Takeuchi, I’m grateful to you.”
He didn’t know how things had turned out that way, but if Natsuki said the woman had saved her, then as her club mate, Yuichi felt he should thank the woman.
“Yuichi... oh, I can die happy!” Aki said with ecstatic emotion.
“I told you not to die! I’m taking you to a friend’s hospital now!”
Yuichi was planning to take her to Noro General Hospital, where Aiko’s father worked. Since Aiko’s father knew him, he’d probably be flexible, and since the hospital was run by vampires, the fact that the patient was a sort of monster shouldn’t pose a problem.
“You know, the promise was that he’d let us leave this place safely, right? You don’t think he’ll attack us the minute we leave the room, do you?” Mutsuko asked as they arrived at the exit.
“That would be pretty sad. You think he’d do it?” Yuichi glanced back at the center of the room. Nergal was just standing there, and didn’t seem inclined to do anything at all.
“I don’t... think so. I think he has a sort of divine pride,” Natsuki said after a moment’s thought.
If Natsuki said it, it was probably true. She knew the man better than they did, after all.
While still keeping his attention focused on what was behind him, Yuichi left the room.
Nothing happened.
They walked a little further until they reached a staircase, which they ascended, and after climbing for a while, they arrived at a door. It opened into a boiler room with lots of exposed piping.
From this side, the door just looked like a wall, and once they closed it, there was no way to see how to open it again.
“It’s like a one-way door in a dungeon crawler!” Mutsuko cried.
“Are you sure it’s okay for us to be here?” Yuichi asked uneasily.
“What choice do we have?” she shot back. “There was no other way out!”
They seemed to be beneath a hotel.
Avoiding the eyes of the employees, they eventually made it to the lobby, where at last they could take a breather. But Aki was still badly injured, and Yuichi was covered in blood, and they had a cat with them. They wouldn’t be able to stay here for long.
Yuichi made a beeline for the exit, but then, from the exit, a familiar-looking boy appeared.
It was Hiromichi Rokuhara.
He’d seemed to have gone off on his own after parting ways with Nergal. What, then, could he be doing here? Just as Yuichi was wondering about that, his phone rang.
Yuichi set Aki down and answered the phone.
“Hey! Exactly where have you been?” the voice on the other end shouted. “You’ve been impossible to reach for hours! I went to the station and found nobody there! How dare you abandon me?!”
It was Chiharu. It was only natural that she hadn’t been able to reach them; their cell phones wouldn’t have had signal underground.
“Yeah, we were underground for a while,” said Yuichi. “What’s going on?”
“The resonance has started again!”
Resonance wouldn’t end until something was “settled.” It had stopped for a while after the priest had defeated the tengu.
“That explains it,” said Yuichi. “This guy’s a Divine Vessel host, right?”
Nergal had said that Hiromichi had a Divine Vessel.
Hiromichi approached.
“You’re not seriously intending to fight us here, are you?” Yuichi asked. They were in the lobby of a hotel with quite a few people inside. He didn’t know what kind of power Hiromichi had, but if they fought here, it could result in serious human casualties. “Did Nergal guide you here? I guess we did make it out safely, though...”
Maybe he’d thought it wouldn’t be an issue to come after them once they were on the surface.
Hiromichi walked up to Yuichi, and then — remaining outside the boundaries of his personal space — swung a hand at him.
Yuichi didn’t sense any threat in the motion. The trajectory of his hand would come nowhere near hitting him, so he didn’t even have to dodge. He could tell Hiromichi wasn’t hiding anything in his hand, and the movement didn’t seem to be a feint to set up for another attack, either.
Thus, Yuichi ignored it.
Hiromichi’s hand swept through the air in front of him. Suddenly, Yuichi felt dizzy, and was assailed by a powerful feeling of loss.
“Yu!” Mutsuko cried, perhaps surprised by Yuichi’s moment of panic.
His vision went black for a moment, and when it returned, it was blurry and hard to focus. But even as he realized that Hiromichi must have done something, Yuichi’s internal senses told him that nothing had changed.
A moment later his view stabilized, and Yuichi noticed that something was different. Something was strange.
Rather, it wasn’t strange.
What had come before was strange, and now, it was normal. Those annoying labels that showed him people’s roles in life were gone.
Hiromichi smirked.
In that moment, Yuichi realized what had happened.
Soul Reader was gone.